Food… Finally!

We had our first meal last night! No, it’s not a new-fangled diet plan; it was just hard for a few days. We had lunch on Monday with the people who brought us to Xela, but since then we had only eaten pieces of bread. Monday we took a grand tour of Xela and got to know our house, the SRE center, the Institute, the property where the new center will be built, and FUNDET, a technical school for returned missionaries. Between one place and another, we spied a bakery, Xelapan, and bought some bread that we figured would tide us over till we had a chance to go shopping on Tuesday. We had bread for Monday dinner and for Tuesday breakfast. Tuesday, we started teaching the workshop in the local center at 8 a.m. Since we weren’t sure how far away the house is from the center, or how long it would take to walk, or if we could even find it, we left at about 6:40 a.m. so that we could hopefully be there by 7:30. It wasn’t the shortest of possible routes, but we did find it and had everything ready for a workshop by 8:00. Of course, no one arrived until after 8:30, when they started straggling in. We were exhausted after the workshop, but went with the center manager to meet some church members who work at a furniture factory (aptly named Deseret) nearby. Our bishop happens to work there as well, so we met him as well as some others who it will be nice to know. We wanted to buy a phone and some food, but when we got to the phone store, we realized that it was going to cost more than we were carrying with us, so we said goodbye to the manager, who had to run home, and followed his directions to Paiz, the local supermarket. Surprisingly, almost everything there costs more than it would in the States! Even rice, which was sold in one or two pound bags, costs two dollars for two pounds. I was shocked. We decided to go home and change and then go to the market to get some food. (I was still in my suit, and things cost more when you not only look American, but like a rich American.) We were not in the part of town that we had seen yesterday, but I knew the direction that the house was in from where we were, so we started walking. It was an educational walk. We learned that “diagonales” and “callejones” and the dirt paths that lead into neighborhoods never come out the other side. It took us a little longer to get home than we had expected, about 2 hours instead of half an hour, but we saw some things we never would have seen had we gone straight down the road to our house. When we got home, we were exhausted, having been up at 5am two mornings in a row and having walked up and down and around the streets of the city for two hours in the hot sun with only some bread from early that morning in our stomachs. We decided to take a little nap, only when we woke up, the sun was nearly down. A quick excursion to the market revealed that everything was closing up. We had some bread for dinner. Wednesday, we had a bit more bread for breakfast, then left, happy in the knowledge that today we would go grocery shopping. We left after the workshop and walked directly to the market and bought rice, beans, vegetables, salt, bananas, platanos, and some sugar. We walked straight home (it’s a long walk when your backpack has 40 pounds of food in it) and decided to make some rice. Only then did we realize that the gas stove had no pilot light. It only lights with a match. I ran upstairs to see if I had left a lighter in my backpack, but it was not there. The sun was coming down again, and we didn’t feel like walking half an hour into the city to get matches or a lighter, then walking back in the dark. We didn’t have very much bread left, but we had a little for dinner. The normal feeling of hunger had long ago been replaced by an insistent sharp pain. Thursday we finished the last of our bread for breakfast, prayed for something better for dinner, and went off to the workshop. After we finished teaching, our center manager took us to HiperPaiz (something like Super Walmart) and we got a lighter. (For more on our adventure on the bus, see The “Bus”.) We got home, started boiling some water, and ate a few hours later. Plain rice with salt, diced tomatoes, and some Steph-made tortillas (her first time making them by herself, but they were delicious) never tasted so good.